Pesto, Girlhood, and Lessons Learned

On a beach for a sweet 16th, circa 2010

I like to eat plain flavours. I always have. I like foods that taste the same every time I taste them. From a young age, I remember peering into the lunchboxes of the kids around me and marvelling, entirely silently, at the spreads other kids could tolerate in their sandwiches or the textures of fruits they could just absorb. 

I never grew out of this. I simply grew out of being ashamed of it, and by the time I was in secondary school and facing the Leaving Cert, my friends and I had implicitly accepted one another. It didn't matter that I was ten years away from an autism diagnosis that would help me to make sense of my internal world. With them, I was just me. We made up a group of nine, and like everyone in our year, we ate lunch sitting in a circle on the scratchy brown carpet that poked up through our tights and was never quite as clean as it could have been. 

All nine of us were quite different. I used to think of us as flames of colours, all melding together to form something I could not quite identify but provided the most warmth I had ever felt. One of the girls was different, though. She was all the colours in one and regularly pushed me beyond my comfort zone. This girl spoke confidently, held her shoulders back and chin high, and I think, at least for a little while, I might have resented her for this freedom. When we were thirteen and in our first week of secondary school, we were randomly assigned to sit together. I remember feeling my insides squirm. I wanted nothing more than to sink into the background of things, and this girl, well, this girl, had opinions. God forbid. When she disagreed with our religion teacher, she did so without breaking eye contact. When she spoke French better than any of us because her cousins were French, she did so without a single waver in her voice. She did not worry about being cringe. She was entirely herself.

Thankfully, something changed along our meandering route through secondary school. I found myself sitting side by side, legs crossed, with this girl every day at lunch, sharing the same patch of scratchy brown carpet and considering her one of my best friends. Soon, I began to watch her lunchbox. She ate variety. She ate colours and shapes and textures and revelled in them. I was seventeen years old, and before her, I had never consciously smelled green pesto. Sometimes, I hated her lunches. I hated how good they smelled and how many barriers stood between me and my ability to eat as she did. Mostly, though, I admired her. I admired her because I knew she would move through life, never apologising for anything that brought her joy - whether speaking French, eating pesto or simply sharing an opinion. 

A few years later, halfway through a hard-won bachelor's degree in a different city, I was struggling. I stood in a Tesco Express near my student accommodation wearing teal skinny jeans and a pink wool beanie hat, knowing I had already spent too long in the fresh produce section. The staff had noticed me; I was sure of it. They saw me do this several times a week. Come in, stare at the food and buy the same items. Over and over. On that day, like many others, I couldn't decide what to eat. I couldn't even choose between my list of safe food. How did people do this? How did people just know what they liked? How did they know what they wanted to eat on any given day? My grip on my pull-along cart grew slick, and I became painfully aware of the electric humming coming from the freezer section three aisles over. I wandered the shelves aimlessly, knowing my problem was not the food—or at least not fully—but everything else: the vastness of my university, the exhaustion filling my bones from a day spent smiling, the coursework I had to do, and the fact that my accommodation consistently smelled of damp and weed. I wanted to eat something warm, something like home, something that would make it all better. 

I found myself pausing in front of several shelves of colourful-looking jars. Admittedly, I only stopped here because the fluorescent lights on this aisle were the only ones in the vicinity that were not blinking. The brands blurred before my eyes, meaning nothing. Numbly, I reached out and took hold of a jar of green pesto. I didn't know what it tasted like. But I did know what it smelled like. It smelled like bravery and the warmth of a particular collection of flames I would only find in my hometown. That night, spread over some pasta, I learned what it tasted like. I ate as if I, too, could become someone who looked at the truth without flinching.

It is my privilege to say that I am still friends with that girl - and that girl continues to shape my very being when we are together. She does not know it, but for me, she charted a course from girlhood to womanhood with her frank honesty that made me less afraid to follow in her wake. Although our group of nine is rarely all together, when we are together, I find myself observing each of them with such warmth in my chest. We are no longer girls. We are women. We are figuring it out. And when I look at each of them, I desperately want to acknowledge how much I have learned from each of them. After all, many small things, like the flavour of pesto, can provide life-altering warmth during our coldest moments.

I don't know if my friends think of me like this or with any fondness. Actually, I don’t know if they think of people in general like this. I don't often explain these inner thoughts when we're together. I've fallen out of the habit of blogging in recent years, so I don't gauge how anyone I previously shared that brown carpet with genuinely feels. Sometimes, I wish I could shake each of them by the shoulders and beg them, convince them to tell me the truth - are you scared too? Do you ever find yourself frozen in a grocery store? Do you ever use the thought of me to tether you back home? 

Even if the answer to that final, most important question is no, I would like to know. It would hurt, but at least I would be sure of what was expected of women approaching thirty. We are meant to move on from one another. We are meant to feel less connected than ever. We are meant never to be a group of nine, completely whole, again. I suppose there's nothing my autistic brain has ever loved more than a rulebook, and the girlhood-to-womanhood pipeline has, so far, been entirely unmapped.

I am unlikely to get an answer to how much my friends think of me, I know. And so, as that is the case, I would like them to know precisely how I feel about them. So, I will release, into the aether, all that I learned from those kind girls—those powerful women. I want them to know that I remember it all. I remember how my friend taught me how to tie up my shirt with a hair tie when we were fourteen to make a crop top. I remember how another gave me a pair of Pulse Accessories pearl earrings one year for Christmas and said, in passing, as if the observation cost her nothing, that I felt like a pearl kind of girl. I will never forget the kindness of another friend who sat with me each day (on that scratchy brown carpet) before chemistry to talk me through the homework. Nor will I forget when another member of our group cut her beautiful, long hair, which I had long since been jealous of. I admired how willing she was to embrace her face, to be utterly exposed at a time when I wanted nothing more than to hide. She shrugged and told me that she was more than her hair. At sixteen, I was sure I had never seen anyone cooler in all of my life. More than anything, I remember how easily I slotted into our constellation of friendship and how special it was for me to feel as though I could do anything in my life with ease.

I hold thousands of these microscopic memories in my mind. I bring each one with me every time I see these girls. I swallow them and keep them in the back of my throat, and instead, I smile and ask casual questions. How’s work? How are the parents? But as we get older, I am beginning to realise that I am not a ‘casual’ kind of friend. I never stood a chance as a casual friend. There's nothing casual about the degree of memory and emotion I put into my loyalty to my friends. As we enter our thirties, we are meant to be casual to one another. Everyone is busier and has new and different priorities, so we simply need to accept that we see and get less of one another. Accept it and become casual with one another. Relaxed. Out of touch to a healthy degree.

And now I want to ask my friends another question - when did you learn to be close, yet detached? Who taught you how to be easygoing? I don't think being a healthy degree of out-of-touch is a poor solution to adulthood. In many ways, it makes sense, and God help me; I am busy enough to benefit from others expecting less of me, too. But in truth, I feel as though I am standing in that aisle in Tesco Express again, holding a jar of pesto, looking for any spark of warmth that might give me the bravery to know how to move ahead. To step into the future of marriagebabiesbirthdaysdivorcedeathscareers with some certainty that once I am on that rollercoaster, I will know exactly what to do. Like all things, this bravery will take practice and a leap of faith. In this instance, I am mid-leap, hoping that when I land I will have learned that casual does not have to mean meaningless. In the meantime, as I prepare to land, I will continue to be grateful for those who helped me to get to my feet every day, from that horrible brown carpet and the many lessons they shared with me, perhaps without realising their own wisdom. I will never forget them.

Until next time,

Jens x